5288

From that piece:

The report, titled “Higher Ground,” crunched federal data to show that just 2 percent of the program’s insured properties were receiving 40 percent of its damage claims. The most egregious example was a home that had flooded 16 times in 18 years, netting its owners more than $800,000 even though it was valued at less than $115,000. That home was located in Houston, along with more than half of America’s worst “repetitive loss properties” identified in the report.

5289

Ivanka Trump who, with her husband Jared Kushner, had been the hope of moderates trying to gain influence in the White House, has backed the scrapping of the initiative. While she has pushed for equal pay for women, Ivanka said in a statement the policy would not lead to pay equality.

“Ultimately, while I believe the intention was good and agree that pay transparency is important, the proposed policy would not yield the intended results,”Ivanka said in a statement. “We look forward to continuing to work with EEOC, [the Office of Management and Budget], Congress and all relevant stakeholders on robust policies aimed at eliminating the gender wage gap,” she added.

Proponents of the Obama-era plan have defended it on the grounds that it would have created an evidence-based foundation on which to address pay discrimination.

“We’d learn about a pay-discrimination problem because someone saw a piece of paper left on a copy machine or someone was complaining about their salary to co-workers,” Jenny Yang, chairwoman of the EEOC said when the rules were drafted. “Having pay data in summary form will also help us identify patterns that may warrant further investigation,” she added at a June conference.

5290

I said this before. Anyone that thought Ivanka was going to have a moderating effect on Trump was fooling themselves.

5291

Yeah, hopefully no one here is still falling for it.

5292

The only way she could not get re-elected is if she had Trump’s baby.

5293

Katrina-LootersAreBlack-GuyWBeerTue30Aug05-AP-DaveMartin

5294

I heard people interviewed on NPR who are stuck in the upper levels of their homes without power. They described already being incredibly bored. Considering that a lot of people are going to be out of their homes for … well, forever, they might as well have some beer while they’re coping. It’s not like we should force them to adhere to Maslow’s pyramid.

5295

given how CA handles Senate elections she could lose.

5296

How? Who is going to beat her? She will die as a US Senator from California.

5297

another Dem makes it to the general and beats her on the left.

5298

With Brown leaving office in 2018 (I think) almost every name Dem is looking at that. Should Feinstein run again, and I think she said she would, she is popular enough (and powerful enough) to beat anyone.

She would literally have to join the GOP or start wearing a MAGA hat to lose.

5299

Ha. But saying she thinks Trump can be a good President practically is wearing a MAGA hat.

5300

She’s saying she hopes Trump can be a good president, which is like saying “I hope that cute snake shaking its maracas at me will let me pet it” but otherwise a no-content, don’t rock the boat kind of statement.

5301

It’s old school political good manners, no? Hillary voiced the same sentiment after her concession. Of course, that was before 7 months of actually watching the guy ‘govern.’

5302

Feinstein is as safe in her Senate seat as you can possibly be. Just as Boxer was when she was in office. No second tier democrat is going to unseat her at this stage. It just isn’t going to happen.

5303

Betsy DeVos has hired a former official at the for-profit college DeVry University to run a unit that investigates for-profit college fraud, according to an email obtained by BuzzFeed News.

The hiring of Julian Schmoke to head the so-called enforcement unit, which was first reported by Politico, prompted anxiety and frustration from some people inside the Education Department who had worked on fraud investigations, said a person with knowledge of the situation.

Reactions to the move are tied up in a record-breaking $100 million settlement against DeVry, reached last year with the Federal Trade Commission, over allegations that the school had misled students about their chances of getting a job. The company also reached settlements with the New York attorney general and the Education Department.

Despite the fact that Schmoke was not closely involved in DeVry’s corporate operations, some staff at the Education Department were upset — concerned, one person at the department said, about the unit’s ability to hold for-profit colleges, especially DeVry, accountable.

Schmoke will oversee a unit that is actively looking into DeVry’s operations, according to two people with knowledge of the enforcement unit’s work. And he will help determine the fate of more than 1,875 former DeVry students who filed claims saying they were defrauded by the university. Those students filed so-called “borrower defense” claims, saying that they were defrauded by DeVry and are entitled to have their student loans forgiven.

Schmoke and the Education Department did not respond to requests for comment.

Democrats were immediately outraged by DeVos’s decision. “This is a joke, right?” tweeted Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy. “Basically akin to nominating influenza to be the Surgeon General.”

5304

On Wednesday, President Trump announced his intention to appoint longtime Republican operative Fred Malek as chair of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a highly recognized think tank that is part of the Smithsonian Institution.

While the position may be a relatively obscure one, Trump’s selection of Malek — coming as it does on the heels of the president defending neo-Nazis who were involved in a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia — is significant, as Malek was involved in one of the most notorious anti-Semitic episodes in modern American history.

Malek, now 80, served as a special assistant to President Richard Nixon. In that role, in 1971, he put together a list of “important Jewish officials” who were working in the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Four of those officials were later demoted.

As The Atlantic has detailed, Nixon had come to believe that Democratic Jews in the BLS were conspiring against him after the bureau released a report playing down a drop in the unemployment rate, and ordered Malek to work on purging them from leadership positions.

The 2012 Atlantic article mentioned in the last paragraph mentions this tidbit about Malek:

Every year or so, poor old Fred Malek, the GOP fundraiser, has to suffer through a callback to his youthful indiscretions, like that one crazy time in his twenties that he and his friends were caught drunkenly barbecuing a dog on a spit, or the wacky moment in his thirties when he counted the Jews in the Bureau of Labor Statistics so President Nixon could demote them, or the hilarious time in his sixties when the Securities and Exchange Commissioned ordered him to personally pay a $100,000 fine for allegedly using taxpayer funds to reward a political supporter. *(Youth!)
[…]
In 1959, Malek and four other men in their 20s were arrested at 2a.m. in a Peoria park when police found them covered in blood. Police found a skinned animal on a spit. Malek said he had nothing to do with the dog killing.

5305

Obviously he was a “man on the inside” the whole time and will be cleaning up the for-profit racket that students got suckered into!

I remember being told I shouldn’t be outraged about the DeVos confirmation because it was a position that had no power and wouldn’t affect the education system in any meaningful way. Good times.

5306

Who else would know con-men better than another con-man?

CHECKMATE LIBTARDS!

5307

“That was an exaggerated statement that, you know, a lot of times is used in the western world when somebody does a crime or commits theft," he said.

“That’s just a western term and I’m very much a western man. … You know, I wear a coat. You know, I dress western. And, you know, I’m the cowboy of the Capitol.”

He’s a cowboy, fellas. He wears a coat.